Are there any emerging computer hardware or software advancements that
will help the deployment of RFID applications?

Is item-level tagging a hype or a reality?

What are the important catalysts for the widespread adoption of RFID?

What does subcutaneous tagging have to do with RFID adoption in the enterprise?

The etymology of the word trend denotes both movement in a general
direction as well as roundabout twists and turns. Early potters could not possibly
have predicted the various turns the wheel would take during the 8,500 years
after it was first invented. Similarly, it is unlikely that Michael Faraday
could have imagined any of today's RFID applications when he discovered
electromagnetic induction.

Technology trends, in particular, are not only shaped by technological invention
and advancements but by economic, social, and political factors. These add
a new dimension of complexity to predicting the ultimate disposition and acceptance
of trends.

Keeping all these complexities in mind, we have identified the top emerging
trends associated with RFID that are expected to drive its ubiquitous adoption.
These trends fall into the following categories: Technological Advancements,
Business Process Innovations, Evolving Standards and Legislation, and Consumer
Application Innovations.

In this chapter, we use these categories as anchor to do the following:

Take stock of where RFID technology stands today

Discuss the recent innovations around RFID

Examine key factors that will influence its evolution

Technological Advancements

Technological advancements are the high-octane fuel that powers the continued
acceptance and growth of new technologies. These advancements can provide the
following advantages:

Make existing applications easier to use

Offer more functionality

Drive deployment costs down

Technological advancements open the door for new applications that were not
imaginable or possible before. In the following section, we explore some of the
more significant technological advancements that are under development
today.

New and Improved Tags

Innovation around the design and manufacture of RFID tags is an ongoing
process. Some of the most promising new designs are covered in the following
sections.

Alternative Tag Designs

Many factors, including physical and environmental, affect the readable range
and accuracy of tags. Some examples are detection near metal or liquid and
extreme weather conditions such as low temperature or high humidity. Besides
simply improving on existing technology to overcome these limitations,
alternative physics are being employed that can sidestep or leapfrog these
limitations.

The majority of the work in the alternative physics area includes
developments around chipless tags, introduced in Chapter 3, "Components of
RFID Systems." Chipless tags promise to improve upon the physical
limitations of radio frequency detection while potentially offering reduced
costs due to the absence of integrated circuitry. Chipless tags can be more
easily applied near metal and liquid or embedded in items like paper, thereby
offering greater flexibility and functionality with their use. One chipless tag
technology showing promise in supply chain applications uses Surface Acoustic
Wave (SAW) technology. SAW technology involves the propagation of radio
frequency acoustic waves on the surface of polished crystals. Other promising
chipless technologies that have the potential to revolutionize RFID applications
use nanotechnology, genomics, or even chemistry to achieve chipless tagging and
unique identification of objects such as paper currency and product labels. You
can find vendors that develop and supply chipless tag technologies at this
book's companion Web site,
http://www.rfidfieldguide.com.

When it comes to major advancements in IC-based tag design, Smart Active
Label (SAL) technology is gaining momentum in the market. SAL offers enhanced
range and accuracy attributes while being less vulnerable to liquid or metal. A
SAL tag is essentially a semi-active smart label with its power source in the
form of a thin, flexible battery. Using SAL tags, tagging and detecting cans of
soda and bottles containing liquid can become more practical and economical.

Tag Packaging

Tag packaging plays a significant role in the applicability and practicality
of specific uses of RFID. Expect to see tag and antenna packaging designs that
will continue to push the envelope of creativity and ingenuity, much as
injectable and ingestible tags have done in the past. Chipless tags based on
nanotechnology will certainly be at the forefront of such developments.

Another entirely different approach to tag packaging that is very promising
is related to printed electronics. This involves the process of
"printing" antennae, transistors, or even integrated circuits using
conductive ink and standard printing processes. The potential to inexpensively
print a tag onto a box or the packaging of an item unlocks a new set of
possibilities for the widespread application of RFID in everyday items. Already,
several companies (identified in the vendor guide at this book's companion
Web site,
http://www.rfidfieldguide.com)
have designed smart label antennae that use conductive ink instead of copper.

Sensory Tags

Tags whose packaging integrates them with sensors can monitor, record, and
even react to all sorts of environmental conditions. Known as sensory tags,
these tag types promote an entirely new set of applications. The major
advancements here will be around the coupling or combining of RFID tag
technology with sensor technology in very small form factors. Smart Dust is one
such combination that offers the functionality of tiny environmental sensors
known as MicroElectroMechanical Sensors (MEMS) with active RFID tag-like
capabilities. Each such device is expected to be one cubic millimeter in size.
The potential applications of this technology span a wide area, from monitoring
battlefield activities in a military operation to tracking the facial movements
of the disabled to control their wheelchairs.

Architecture for the New Network

RFID systems generate mountains of new data that need to be synchronized,
filtered, analyzed, managed, and acted upon, often in real-time or near
real-time. Each tag is essentially a single computing device, albeit a very
simple one, that acts as one node in a network of, eventually, billions or even
trillions of such devices. This new network is dramatically different and in
many ways more complex than even the Internet, the most complex network ever
known. This fact is due primarily to the number of nodes that could exist in the
expanded model of a worldwide RFID network, which will be several orders of
magnitude larger than the number of nodes on the Internet. This simply means
that traditional computing architectures and infrastructures will not be
adequate to handle the dramatically higher data volumes expected in a network of
RFID tags. Here, we discuss two different approaches under development that
address the requirements of this new network from both hardware and software
perspectives.

Where will all this RFID data come from?

Consider the scenario where a major retail chain will be tagging all its
goods in all its stores, at the single item level. The number of tagged items in
this scenario can easily reach 10 billion or more. This means that the data
identifying the 10 billion items amounts to 120 gigabytes (10 billion x 12 bytes
per tag). If these items were read once every 5 minutes somewhere in the supply
chain, they would generate nearly 15 terabytes of tracking data every day (120
gigabytes x 12 times per hour x 10 hours per day). That's 15 terabytes of
additional data generated by one retail chain every day. Using this formula, 10
major retailers tagging and tracking every item will generate 150 terabytes of
data. This is bigger than the estimated 136 terabytes of data from 17 million
books in the U.S. Library of Congress1. Obviously, a great majority
of this RFID data is duplicate and will likely be discarded. However, all the
data needs to be processed, examined, and acted upon, even if such action means
simply ignoring much of it.

We use item-level tagging (a more distant scenario) to demonstrate the
eventual avalanche of RFID data. However, you can apply a similar formula to
calculate the amount of data for a more immediate scenario: case- and
pallet-level tagging. Although the volume of data in this case is an order of
magnitude smaller, it still represents several orders of magnitude more data
than a pre-RFID scenario.

Microprocessor Design

Several computer giants are revising their microprocessor development
roadmaps in favor of a new microprocessor architecture called Chip
Multi-Threading (CMT). One of the pioneers in this area is Sun Microsystems,
which has already introduced the first design of this new architecture. This is
just in time for the expected volume spike in RFID data as the U.S. Department
of Defense (DoD) and major retailers around the world go into full deployment
mode with their mandates. Simply put, CMT architecture bucks the trend of
traditional microprocessor design and architecture that primarily seeks to
perform single tasks faster and faster. Instead, CMT is an architecture that
allows the efficient execution of many tasks simultaneously. This is parallel
computing taken all the way to the core of the microprocessor.

Peer-to-Peer Computing

Although the data generated by RFID systems can easily reach trillions of
bytes that need to be processed almost instantaneously, much of the data is
disbursed across one or more enterprises, and often across the globe. This
suggests that local processing of data, by RFID readers, before passing it along
to a centralized computer can dramatically reduce the burden placed on
centralized computing resources. This is an excellent scenario in which to apply
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) programming techniques to perform RFID-related data
processing locally. P2P technology is a type of distributed computing technique
that decentralizes computing tasks across several less powerful cooperating
computers (peers) within a network.

Expect RFID readers to become increasingly more "intelligent."
Readers will perform many of the data processing, analysis, and management tasks
within a local network of cooperating tags and readers. They will accomplish
what today is mostly done by centralized computers.

Falling RFID Tag Price

With RFID technology, cost of components, especially cost of individual tags,
will play a major role in determining its ultimate success and ubiquity. From an
economic perspective, the cost of tags is expected to continue to drop as the
volume production goes up to meet demand. However, both alternative chipless tag
designs and advances in fabrication and manufacturing of integrated circuits
(IC) are expected to drive the cost of tags dramatically lower. The 5 cents
tag, as it has been called, has been widely viewed as the inflection point
where wide adoption of RFID will quickly occur. To be clear, the supply and
demand equation alone is unlikely to drive the price of IC-based tags down to
the 5 cents mark. Today, tag prices barely dip below 25 cents, even in high
volumes. Therefore, alternative tag designs and more efficient tag manufacturing
are likely to be important factors in driving the cost of tags down by another
factor of five.